Bill Graham usually dressed in a sweater vest, coat and tie during his years as rock’s foremost impresario.

The one notable exception was his famed New Year’s Eve concerts with the Grateful Dead. In those shows, he would reveal a part of him that reflected the crazy alternative world he helped to promote, as if to say, “I’m just like you. It’s just the rest of the time I have to be an adult.”

In 1990, Graham came on stage dressed as a witch doctor in only a loincloth. It would be his last New Year’s Eve. Graham was killed in a helicopter crash coming back from a concert on Oct. 25, 1991.

His unlikely story and even more unlikely impact on culture are the subjects of Skirball Cultural Center’s “Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution,” the first comprehensive retrospective about him.

Walking through the exhibition can seem like a trip down memory lane for those old enough, complete with music from the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and The Rolling Stones. There’s also a light-show installation, and other sights and sounds to evoke the era.

After putting on two concerts as fundraising events in November 1965, Graham decided to become a promoter full time. His first gig was the Trips Festival, a three-day acid test hosted by novelist Ken Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and his band of Merry Pranksters at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall in January 1966.

Kesey and his group were pioneering an anarchic LSD-fueled lifestyle, and other psychedelics (chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), as they traveled around the country on a colorfully painted bus.

The festival was anarchy in San Francisco, with Graham running around the hall, a clipboard in hand, attempting to maintain a semblance of order.

As Erin Clancey, Skirball’s curator on the exhibition tells it, “Kesey was in a space suit letting people in for free and Graham told him to stop, but Kesey just flipped down his visor and kept letting people in for free.”

She notes that Graham “was the straight-laced businessman in the middle of all these free-spirit, free-thinking people.”

The promoter adjusted to it all. He had known real chaos in his early life.

Born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin on Jan. 8, 1931, the son of Russian Jews, his father would die the same year. When Nazi Germany became too dangerous for him, his mother sent him to France. She would die on a train to Auschwitz while one of his sisters died in the death camp and another survived.

Graham lived with other young Jewish refugees in chateaus used to house orphans. His only fresh food sometimes would be apples he pilfered from nearby orchards. When Paris fell to the Nazis, a Red Cross worker took the orphans south, and eventually the malnourished Graham arrived in New York on Sept. 24, 1941.

Taken in by a foster family, the refugee worked hard to be American, trading his German accent for one of a New Yorker and picking out a new name, with the help of a phone book. He was drafted and was awarded a Bronze Star in the Korean War.

After the service, his dream was to be an actor and he was attracted to the Bay Area, home to the Free Speech Movement and a burgeoning counterculture. He became the business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and when it got into legal trouble for one of its performances, he mounted a benefit concert for the troupe featuring the Fuggs and Jefferson Airplane on Nov. 6, 1965.

“It’s an important date for rock ’n’ roll,” says Clancey. “He saw the crowd enjoying themselves. This instant community and paying to get in. Immediately he said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ”

While counterculture rock was a force on its own, it took Graham — and some others — to shape it and expand it. Graham was unable to get his own promoters license at first, but local businessman Charles Sullivan, who had been presenting rhythm and blues shows, allowed Graham to use his dance-hall permit for rock shows at the Fillmore Auditorium.

A fan of salsa, jazz and blues growing up, Graham wanted to develop the interest of white audiences attending the rock shows by including acts like B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and Martha and the Vandellas.

Graham’s nearly 26-year career as a rock impresario was often as turbulent as it was spectacular. Actor Peter Coyote, a friend and member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe as well as the Merry Pranksters, once called him “a cross between Mother Teresa and Al Capone.”

But the concerts he promoted at the Fillmores (the Auditorium, East and West) and Winterland helped secure the legacy of many of rock’s greatest acts. In 1969, he worked behind the scenes to pull off the love-in of Woodstock, securing a spot for the relatively unknown Santana, and later Altamont, the massive Rolling Stones concert that ended in tragedy. Later, he would promote “The Last Waltz” for The Band (1976), Live Aid (1985) and Human Rights Now (1988).

For those not old enough to remember those heady days, “Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution” may seem like a circus with more than three rings. There are tons of memorabilia, including some priceless guitars — one played by Carlos Santana, a 1958 Fender Stratocaster used by Robbie Robertson during “The Last Waltz,” and a 1959 Gibson Les Paul played by Duane Allman on the Allman Brothers Band album “At Fillmore East.” There are also photographs, archival concert footage, historical and new video interviews, ephemera, psychedelic art and, of course, music.

But running throughout the exhibition is also the story of a complex man and an immigrant’s story. He forged a new identity in America and became a success in helping to transform rock music into a giant industry that impacted world culture.

Perhaps the most endearing item in the exhibition comes first — the original apple barrel that greeted fans with fresh apples at the entrance to the Fillmore Auditorium with a sign that said “Take One or Two.” The public is seeing it for the first time in more than 40 years. Back then, the reason for it might have been passed off as some kind of hippie thing, and maybe it was. But as you go through the exhibition, you realize it’s also because Graham never forgot where he came from.

Rob Lowman began at the L.A. Daily News working in editing positions on the news side, including working on Page 1 the day the L.A. Riots began in 1992. In 1993, he made the move to features, and in 1995 became the Entertainment Editor for 15 years. He returned to writing full time in 2010. Throughout his career he has interviewed a wide range of celebrities in the arts. The list includes the likes of Denzel Washington and Clint Eastwood to Kristin Stewart and Emma Stone in Hollywood; classical figures like Yo Yo Ma and Gustavo Dudamel to pop stars like Norah Jones, Milly Cyrus and Madonna; and authors such as Joseph Heller, John Irving and Lee Child. Rob has covered theater, dance and the fine arts as well as reviewing film, TV and stage. He has also covered award shows and written news stories related to the entertainment business. A longtime resident of Santa Clarita, Rob is still working on his first more-than-30-year marriage, has three grown children (all with master's degrees) and five guitars.

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